Several years ago, I made some adaptations to my parenting style. Mainly, I raised the my expectations for my kids’ behavior, and developed a strategy to follow up on those expectations. One of the most important things I did was to bring my kids closer to me and consciously spent more time with them when they did something displeasing (rather than the very popular ‘push kids away’/time out approach that it touted, which I think I’ve shared my feelings about a while back). A very few times at the beginning, this meant that I told whatever child involved that they would need to sleep in my room if I felt that they had showed they wouldn’t behave appropriately in their own rooms at night without supervision. I didn’t do it punitively, but I had them make up a pallet on the floor next to my bed. This wasn’t something I had to do very often at all, but I very soon saw that the kids actually really liked it – one child asked me the next night if he could sleep in my room again! I then saw clearly how a disciplinary measure could be loving and perceived as such by both parent and child, while simultaneously improving the behavior and building the parent-child relationship. Our kids really want to be close to us.
Anyway, on to the present. Last nights I spontaneously offered to let my 9 year old son sleep in my room, since my husband wasn’t home, something I do every once in a while for my middle three (6,8, 9). Not because he needed more of my presence or for me to keep an eye on him, but because I thought he’d want to. I was right – he jumped up and said, “Really?! Thanks, Mommy!” And rushed to get ready for bed.
He gets up earlier than I do to go to shul with my 15 year old, so he brought his own alarm to my room because I’m still sleeping when they leave. I happened to wake up before his alarm went off, but I thought it was 6 am when he woke up. It was still dark. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I picked up a book from the pile next to my bed (I never told you how many books I’m usually in the middle of, did I? Let’s just say I usually have a nice pile next to my bed.:)). About a half hour later, I looked at my watch, and saw that it was only 6 am, and was still dark. Meaning that he had woken up at 5:30.
Later today, my older son told me he was really tired, and I told him I had been really surprised to see that they woke up so early, because I thought they went to a later minyan. He said B. (the 9 year old) wanted to go to the earliest minyan possible, so he agreed to take him to the 6:20 minyan. I couldn’t think of any reason why B. would prefer one minyan over another, so I asked E. (15 year old) why they chose that one. He said that B. wanted to daven as early as possible, because then they’d have more time between the time they finished davening and the time I told them they have to be home for breakfast (we recently changed breakfast to 9 am so that they wouldn’t have to rush home, but I’m adamant that they must be home by then).
Then I was wondering why did he want more time between davening and breakfast? The answer: so he could learn more mishnayos! He really loves learning with his big brother – their daily learning time is in the morning before coming home (though they often like to do more later on in the day or evening), and this morning he came home from shul and told me with a lot of excitement that they did 11 mishnayos this morning, a new record! He’s definitely intrinsically motivated. 🙂 You should see how fast they’re going through mishnayos – whew!
I love seeing my kids taking the intiative to further their own learning goals, something I was told years ago that kids needed to be in school to learn, that a child on his own wouldn’t want to learn. One more example for me of how trusting the process of learning and your child really works.
Avivah
